Myth, Magic, and Mystery:
A Mix for Religious Liberals?
Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, December 14, 1997
Some years ago one of our UU ministers, Rev. Chris Raible, whose sense of humor leans towards the perverse, authored a parody of our old blue hymnal, "Hymns for the Celebration of Life". Chris called his "Hymns for the Cerebration of Strife". In one of his cerebral re-writes he uses a familiar Christmas carol to tweak our UU noses a bit at how we can make a fetish out of our usually rightful reliance on reason when it come to matters of religion. He called it "God Rest You Unitarians." To wit:
God rest you Unitarians, let nothing you dismay.
Remember there's no evidence there was a Christmas day.
When Christ was born is just not known, no matter what they say.
Good tidings of reason and fact; reason and fact;
Good tidings of reason and fact.There was no star of Bethlehem; there was no angel song.
There could have been no wise men for the journey was too long.
The stories in the Bible are historically wrong.
Good tidings of reason and fact; reason and fact.
Good tidings of reason and fact.Much of our Christmas custom comes from Persia and from Greece.
From solstice celebrations of the ancient middle East.
We know this so-called holiday is but a pagan feast.
Good tidings of reason and fact; reason and fact;
Good tidings of reason and fact.
Chris Raible is being playful here and I appreciate it as such, even though his words are indeed factually correct. I think he's also trying to say that reason and fact alone can be a pretty thin stew when it comes to offering "good tidings" during this season. Expressions of "good tidings" are more likely found in the realm of mythology and mystery, and that's a realm which we religious liberals have rather mixed feelings about entering. In- deed, among the many and varied reasons I hear as to why people come and join our church, in one that says, "I want to get away from all that mythology I'm supposed to believe in. I like to come into a church where I don't have to check my brains at the door." I can relate to that; and I appreciate the idea that one of the things that draws people to us is the desire to escape mythology that is presented as fact and that is used as the basis for doctrine or dogma. I'm glad we can provide a haven in that regard.
But I also think we can go beyond just being a haven. For while its true that we do not check our brains at the door of this church, the larger truth is that we bring more than just our brains through the door. We bring our whole selves--our feeling selves, our wondering selves; our selves that are in need of "good tidings" of comfort and joy and hope and healing. I believe there is a place, an important and valued place in our community, for legend and stories and mythology when it come to offering such good tidings and that is the topic I wish to address this morning. Its not exactly a new topic for me, I know; but its one I do like to return to in some fashion at this time of year. Actually I want to do a couple of things today: First, I'll speak to what I see as being the value of mythology for religious liberals, and then I'll say a little about how I continue to relate to one of the central legends or myths of this season--the story of the birth of Christ. I'll be saving some of the latter for the Christmas Eve service, but will touch on it today as well.
In looking at the value and power of mythology in contemporary society its pretty hard to avoid the work and influence of the late Dr. Joseph Campbell. After spending practically all of his life in academia--most of it as a Professor of Religious Studies and Mythology at New York's Sarah Lawrence College--Campbell became something of a folk hero, and closed out his life with real flair, thanks to a Public Broadcasting Series program he did with Bill Moyers called "The Power of Myth." The series aired right around the time of his death in 1987. The huge popularity of both the 13 week program and the book it generated made a very strong statement about both the continuing interest in and need for mythology in what is an increasingly secular culture.
At the heart of Campbell's work is his contention that myths--whatever the particular religious or cultural language and setting in which they are told--are metaphors about human life. On the surface they describe supposedly external events: The creation of the world by a God or gods; a birth (virgin or otherwise) that comes from the union of a divine and earthly parent; a death followed by a resurrection; the hero or heroine who is also the Savior of humanity. According to Campbell, these are really stories about something that is going on with us, "in here", right now rather that "out there" somewhere in a fanciful past. As he put it: "Myths are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance...We all need help in our passages from birth to life and then to death. We need...to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are...Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of life." Dr. Campbell was, and is, not without his detractors or those who question the efficacy of his contentions; but I feel there is enough validity to Campbell's ideas to use them for my purposes today.
Campbell was a student of Dr. Carl Jung, and it was from Jung that he got the idea that the ultimate, or deepest, origin of mythology is in what Jung called the "collective unconscious." This is probably Psych 101 for most of you, but here's a quick "Jungian take": We each have our conscious level, which is what we are aware of, or what we happen to recall, during our waking moments. You are each and all operating on your conscious level right now--unless you're asleep or into a deep daydream. (Which is OK; just go with it.)
Below your waking consciousness--to use a spacial metaphor--is your personal unconscious. This is where you store all your personal memories, experiences, desires, fears, urges, compulsions, and the like. Some of that personal unconscious you dip into frequently--some of it you rarely, if ever, touch at all. In a comic strip, which is now discontinued, called "Outland" there was a character called Binkley who had this closet in his room that he was always afraid to open because of all the weird and crazy stuff that came out. The closet was his personal unconscious. This is where we store our "personal stuff." Some of that stuff is pleasant, a lot of it is mundane, some of it can be pretty frightful and scary.
Then, according to Jung, there was one more step we take down to what he called the "collective unconscious." This is "common closet", so to speak, of the whole human race--a realm where all the "collective stuff" of humanity resides. Jung, whose father was a Lutheran minister, came to notice that in some of the dreams his clients were relating were some common themes, symbols, and motifs. He also came to notice that some of these same themes, symbols and motifs were contained in the stories or myths of various religions. So Jung decided that both dreams and mythologies are ultimately rooted in this common closet of humankind. The actual content of the myths will be different from one culture to another; but some of the same fundamental motifs dealing with the mysteries of birth, life, death, and certain forms of rebirth and renewal--all the things we as a human race celebrate and hope for and fear--are common to all of them. Myths, then, draw from a common human pool of memory and thought. They tell us about who we are, about how we find meaning, about our deepest hopes, longings, and fears.
So, myths are not really lies. They only come to be regarded as such when they are offered as facts. To treat them uniformly as lies is, in Dr. Campbell's words, to get "stuck in the metaphor" rather that looking past the metaphor and letting it speak to you about your relationship to yourself and to all the rest of Life--to letting it touch you in some realm of your being beyond that of reason and fact. When you stand in front of a painting, for example, you probably do not ask "Is this picture true or false?" or "Did this painting 'really happen'?" Such questions miss the point of the artist's work. The much more relevant questions are "Does this painting touch me?...Does it pull me out of myself?...Does it give me a connection to the rest of Life, the rest of Being, that I hadn't felt before?" This is what mythology is also supposed to do--that is its purpose. Myths are also like paintings in that some can move and inspire you greatly while others don't do a thing for you at all. What catches one person, when it comes to both mythology and art, does not catch another.
To move now to what catches me in this season, let's recall some of Rev. Sommerfeld's words again which I read earlier: "Why do you celebrate Christmas? You do not believe in virgin births. You do not believe that Jesus was a deity...True, but...we believe that some stories deserve to live forever because of what they tell us about ourselves..." Do they? Do stories about a virgin birth, and about a baby's birth which is also hailed as the coming of a deity tell us anything about ourselves? We who like our stories to square with "reason and fact"? Well, let's give them a try.
To go just one more round with Joseph Campbell, he has a take on the virgin birth story that I find more than a little fascinating. He really gets going on this one, as a matter of fact, jumping from Christianity to Greek mythology to Egyptian mythology to Buddhism and Hinduism to show what a common theme the idea of either a virgin birth, or the birth involving a deity and earthly parent really is. They are all over the place. Are they falsehoods? They certainly are if you treat them biologically. But try a different question: What is it in our collective unconscious--in that common closet of humanity--that keeps popping out in the form of all these stories about a birth which is brought about by the union of a divine and earthly parent? According to the late Dr. Campbell it goes something like this: Once our biological or sexually generated birth has taken place and as we grow to maturity, the desire for another type of birth comes on--call it the desire for a "spiritual awakening." By this I mean a search and desire for a heightened sense of personal identity, the wish to be born to new levels of human awareness, to be awakened to compassion, to be able to experience life as something more than the sheer rubrics of existence. All of these divine--or spiritual parent--stories arise from this collective desire for another kind of birth in life some years after we have been born to life. All of these divine and earthly parent myths or legends--like the one involving Mary and the Hebrew God--are metaphors for the birth of your identity, of your awakening to new realms of life and living, of your spiritual awareness, of the god, goddess, or whatever-you-choose-to-call-it, in YOU.
The stories of both Jesus and the Buddha begin with their mothers becoming pregnant after an encounter with the divine. They both came to be regarded as persons who lived and taught on the basis of a special kind of enlightenment and compassion for humanity. Their stories are those of individuals who lived with a renewed and heightened consciousness. How "real" or "factual" the stories, legends and myths about Jesus Christ or the Buddha actually are--they are also stories about who or what we can be or attain on the strength of our own humanity. I think we can use a little mythology now and then in order to be awakened to who or what we may yet be or become.
As for the legend of the birth of Jesus itself, this too can still catch me. A child of questionable parentage is born under very precarious conditions--in a barn and with his peasant parents on the road. Today we'd call such a baby a "child at risk." But then, so the legend or myth goes on, this rather desperate and precarious birth takes on cosmic dimensions. The night skies light up, celestial voices and songs are heard by nearby sheep herders; even the planets align themselves in such a way as to attract the attention and eventual attendance of distant astrologers. Its all rather fantastic and fanciful and mysterious and magical. It contains all the elements, in other words, that Campbell says makes up a good myth.
But this myth is double-edged. The theology that later came to surround this legend held that the baby-child, who was given the rather common Jewish name of Jesus, and who was born under the most precarious, desperate, and seemingly insignificant circumstances, is also "God." I do not even know what that means in any literal sense because I do not have a literal concept of a Being called God. But the idea catches me, nonetheless. The image or metaphor of an obscure baby who is also proclaimed to be God--or a Child of God--is a reminder that what, or who, is often overlooked, ignored, or unseen is also of the greatest importance. It is a reminder that those who live in the most precarious and desperate of circumstances possess that same inherent worth and dignity--that same "spark of the divine" as Emerson called it--that resides in you and me. It is a reminder that each child that is born--those into safe, secure, and nurturing environments such as we want to provide for each and all of our children, and those born into the most precarious and desperate of environments--each one deserves a chance to realize the dignity and the divinity that he or she possesses. To be sure, at some point--when the child is no longer a child--what he or she does with such a chance is a matter of personal choice and personal responsibility. My point here is that if the divine spark is not validated and celebrated at the earliest age, it become harder and harder to realize, to bring to light, as time goes on.
It was some 40-50 years ago that the Unitarian religious educator and minister, Sophia Fahs, penned the words "Each night a child is born is a holy night." They have become something of a UU mantra that gets invoked in our congregations at this time of year. Sophia Fahs' words are also double-edged. As a symbol for holiness, or for that which we value and honor above all else, a newborn child can be most endearing. It can be a painful metaphor at the same time. "Each night a child is born is a holy night" is both an endearing and a painful statement. The reality of the many un-holy circumstances under which children are born and live can easily cause us to hear such a statement with a jaundiced ear and with an air of cynicism. What we need, and often long for is the ability and the motivation to move beyond cynicism and resignation and to keep on believing in the power and vitality of life, in our continuing capacity for compassion and caring, and in the worthiness of our own efforts to be bearers of life in whatever ways we can. I think the various appeals for help and kindness that our newspapers feature at this time of year--appeals that more often than not involve the needs of children--are directed at these needs and longings. One of the reasons we respond to such appeals, I think, is because we still do need to believe that "each night a child is born is a holy night."
Perhaps the reason that the myth or legend of the birth of Jesus has retained its power and its beauty over the centuries is because its taps into certain universal and collective human needs and longings...for hope and for safe and protected lives. For the Christian the message in the legend is that God decided to give humanity another chance by appearing on earth as a human being; first in the form of a helpless child, and later--when the child grew up--as an adult who tried to teach us the ways of love and compassion. Its a message I continue to appreciate. As a religious humanist, the message I now take from the myth is that Life keeps giving us both another chance and another challenge with each new life that comes into the world. How we respond to that chance and meet that challenge is in our hands and in our hearts. The babe in the manger is an enduring symbol of the new life that both blesses and challenges and confronts us each day.
"We believe in songs which are born in the hearts and minds of people. We believe that some stories deserve to live forever because of what they tell us about ourselves. The angels singing an anthem of peace and goodwill deserve to be heard forever because they are the angels (which are found) in human hearts...The wise men, so faithfully seeking the way of a star, deserve to go in search again each year as long as years shall be, for they are the story of the quest for ourselves."
I don't know if Rev. Sommerfeld ever spoke those words from this pulpit during the rather short time he was minister here in the late 1940's, but they certainly retain their timeliness over the years. One of the things that brings us together throughout the year is what he calls a "quest for ourselves." It is not a "quest for ourselves" in a narcissistic or self-indulgent manner, but a quest to know our deeper selves, our truer selves, our healed and reconciled selves. Most importantly, its a quest for the selves we have to offer and share with one another. My hope is that the stories, legends, and myths that are told and sung at this time of year can aid and inspire us in such a quest.
Along with our celebration of reason and our strong respect for the world of facts, may we also, in the words of David Rhys Williams, "warm ourselves by the fireside of fancy, and take counsel of the wisdom of poetry and legend."
Copyright © 1998 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
